Headsets, which combine mono or stereo headphones with at least one microphone, are commonly used with multimedia devices that support voice-controlled features. They may also be used with telephony devices, and with aviation communication devices, in order to reproduce sounds received as audio signals from these devices, and to capture and transmit spoken utterances from the wearer. Active noise cancelling is sometimes included in the headsets to reduce unwanted ambient sounds using active noise control, in addition to passive noise isolation.
Contemporary headphones and headsets with passive sound isolation and/or active noise-cancelling are manufactured in a variety of form factors, and offer various controls and features. However, the focus of the new design features has been on headphone functionality (e.g., headphone speaker volume, active noise cancellation enable/disable) and remote control of connected source devices (e.g., including call answer, mute, play, pause, and skip controls). Little attention is paid to the processing of signals from the vocal microphone(s) used to pick up a wearer's own speech, as may be used for hands-free telephony or to command a speech-controlled device, and the configurability of relative levels of the different audio signals that may be output by the headsets.
Solutions exist that allow a wearer to hear their surroundings by turning off active noise cancelling and redirecting ambient noise captured by the microphone(s) used for active noise cancellation to the headset speakers. While the wearer can hear their surroundings, this all-or-nothing approach does not provide the headphone wearer the ability to control the mix of ambient noise relative to the media source to which they were listening, and skews how a wearer perceives their own voice relative to ambient sounds, with their own spoken utterances captured by the same microphones used to capture other ambient noises. The resulting perceptual-skew may cause a wearer to speak abnormally loud relative to how they would speak if they were not wearing the headphones.
In addition to providing limited control over what is heard, existing solutions also fail to isolate spoken utterances from other ambient noises. If a wearer's speech is picked up by a noise cancellation microphone, the utterance may be cancelled out like other ambient noises, depriving a headset wearer of the feedback provided by hearing their own voice. In the alternative, if captured speech is picked up by a dedicated microphone and provided as feedback to the wearer through the headphones, captured ambient noise will also be reproduced, thereby defeating the advantage of noise cancellation.